Episode 229: Greg Johnson: Crafting Captivating Email Campaigns and Turning Subscribers into Gold

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. This is your host, Stacy Lauren. The thing that I love about Doing the Thing is that when I get to do new things, I get to bring other people in on the excitement of the thing and I get to really expand what I'm doing by getting to talk to people who are experts in the space and being able to just get different insights. And that's why I brought in my next guest, Greg Johnson, who is someone that I've gone to many times during this do the Thing journey of both building my community, engaging the people in the community, and then also when I decided to finally turn do the Thing in the business. He's one of the people that really helped me unblock kind of where I was going because I wanted to make sure it was coming from the deepest place of what was important to me. And he's so good at being able to help people get clarity and also give them tactical strategies to be able to move and get momentum with the audience that they're building. And so Greg Johnson is the founder of email Magic. He is the coach to hundreds of e commerce entrepreneurs who are on the path to making their first million dollars in sales within about a year. He is the master of getting and keeping the most valuable asset on the planet, the intention of a specific audience. So I want you guys to buckle up because you're about to meet the email master, Greg Johnson. Now, when it comes to snagging and, oh boy, holding the undivided attention of a specific audience, Greg's your go to guru. He's mastered the art and science of it, making him an in demand coach. Among those eager to magic up their email game and audience engagement. With Greg on your side, consider your audience captivated and your e commerce journey supercharged. So I am welcoming Greg to the show. Hey, Greg.

Hey, Stacy. Thank you so much for the kind intro. I'm really glad to be here today.

I told you before, I've been looking forward to this since we scheduled it because I just cannot wait to dive into all of your wisdom around what.

We'Re doing right now for sure. First, I want to address that expert panel thing. So if any of your listeners. This was a few weeks ago, right? You did expert panel around audience building and I was there, but I was having audio and visual issues, but I didn't know it until about 30 minutes into what you were presenting. So basically there were a bunch of other people there and they were commenting and giving all this stuff and from my screen I thought that I was Just there but getting skipped over. But it turns out everybody else saw this blanked out panel that said Greg Johnson with no audio and no video and, and I had no idea anything was wrong for like 30 or 45 minutes. So that was really embarrassing. So I'm glad I'm back here to, to maybe redeem myself a little bit.

You know what, number one, I've learned now to test things prior to going live. So that was a good lesson for me too. But also we wouldn't be having this full on conversation about this topic because there's so much that I want to know about being able to convert your audience. I'm doing it through Facebook Group, which builds a community, which builds engagement, but we're also on the side building an email list. So I mean, what is better than to have this opportunity one on one to be able to explore this with you?

It worked out for the best, I guess.

Yeah. So why don't you first just share a little bit about email magic. We'll kind of get into the beginning and then I'll dive in with a bunch of questions that I have.

Yeah, absolutely. I'll start one step past that. I've been a full time business owner for 10 years, both in a brick and mortar B2B business, but then also the digital realm, e commerce, digital marketing. And I've always kind of had this knack for writing, I suppose. And so when I discovered the power that you can wield with email marketing, it was just a natural attraction and a natural fit for me. So I've been using email marketing in my own businesses and helping other people with theirs to drive revenue, to drive engagement, but ultimately to drive cultivation of relationships between a business and their best customers. So email magic is basically my personal email list, my personal email newsletter where I talk about my crazy ideas, things that I'm specifically doing, things I'm specifically learning. And it's just an opportunity for me to brain dump everything that I know about email marketing, copywriting, relationship building and generating revenue just into a place where I can disseminate that into other people's inboxes for their consumption and enjoyment or deletion if they don't like it.

And I love how you put that, the things that you're doing, the things that you're learning. Because I think so many people, they get tripped up of what they're supposed to email and it's such a, I read your newsletter all the time and it's such an interesting way to kind of, of get knowledge and then also even Get, I feel like I get connected to you that way too because I'm hearing these things. And so I think so many people can overthink what to email, but you can literally just state what you're working on.

And that's absolutely. I tell people all the time this doesn't need to be complicated. You don't need to be some sort of expert copywriter or anything for this to work. The way to think about email, to keep it simple, is it should have the feel of a one on one conversation. So if you're sitting down with a friend at a coffee shop and you haven't spoken in a while and you're just catching up, telling stories, that's the vibe that you want. That's my style. That's the vibe I want in my emails. I want it to be conversational. I want it to feel, I mean, injected with my personality. I want it to feel like people are talking to me. But the magic of email as a marketing tool is that you can create that one on one conversational experience at scale. So I can click send and send that experience out to thousands of people in seconds. And everybody who receives that is having the experience of talking to me one on one.

And then on top of email magic, you're also a coach for capitalism.com, which is how we originally met. And it's been amazing just to be able to see you help so many people through that. And so just your depth of knowledge through experience by helping people has been extraordinary. Do you want to just share a little bit about kind of what you do there as well?

Absolutely. So I'm a coach inside of the capitalism.com communities and that business is all about helping entrepreneurs to build a physical product brand up to over a million dollars in revenue. So they can either position it to sell or that can be a life sustaining business for them. So it's funny, it sounds very different to be doing coaching on zoom calls versus email marketing, but for me they're different aspects of exactly the same thing. When I'm doing the coaching, I'm having one on one conversations with people, understanding what their problems and pain points are and helping them to understand what the real problems and pain points are and helping them to arrive at a solution. And that is essentially what I try to do through email as well. There are different expressions of my joy of helping other people get what they're after in building and growing a business. So I mean, that really is my passion and I love what I get to do there and hope that I can do even more in the future.

I think this is what I like so much about you. And if you guys want to hear our full episode where we heal Ker Greg's story, and he has a great metaphor for the iPhone and how it's okay to evolve and to iterate and not to just worry about changing things. And so, anyway, definitely check out the other episode with him for the full story. But the thing that I love so much about you is you're not just getting someone to make money. Obviously, that's what you're doing, right? You're helping them tap in to what makes them feel alive and what they actually want to do in the world. And then you're connecting those things together. And I love that piece of what you do because I think that's why people are so successful in what they're doing, because you're helping them tap into it.

Absolutely. I mean, I think most people feel this way. We want to feel like what we're doing actually matters. We want to feel like the money that we make was honestly earned. Right. So I care that if people are paying me for a certain outcome, a certain result, or something along those lines, that they actually get it. Otherwise, I don't feel good about that. If I wanted to make money unethically or dishonestly, I can make a lot more money selling drugs or robbing banks or something like that. So, again, I care about what I'm actually doing that's actually having an impact and matters, and that's not always easy. So that is also a constant process of iteration and learning and being curious about what people actually need and what actually helps them to get what they need. And so the more I work with people, the more people I work with, I feel the better that that delivery that those results get, which is another thing that drives me forward. I know that I'm getting better, and I know that the people that I work with are getting better.

Okay. So I'm excited to dive into this. So, as you know, I am creating this new audience accelerator program, and we're using Facebook in the center, the program where that's the center point for all of the things where the engagement with your community is happening and you're able to do live videos in the group, and you're really just building up that camaraderie both between you and the people in there. But even more so, the people are building it within themselves, so they're feeling that sense of connectedness. And that's really what my. I think my purpose on earth Is. Is to make people feel more connected. And it's probably stemming from me feeling so disconnected. And then I tapped into what helped me get connected. So now my mission is to help people do that and whether that's through getting connected to themselves or getting connected to other people. So I'm really excited about this. It's just blows my mind that I get to help people do this, which I think is kind of how you feel with what you're doing. And so what stems, this is your email. So I am an avid reader of Greg's newsletter because there's so many good tidbits in there that I love to implement into my stuff. But there was one email that he wrote that really caught my attention, which was something about don't wait too long to monetize your list. And I feel like this kind of goes along with this email strategy. Right. Because that's where people will buy for me. I don't really want to be selling in my group unless I'm on a live video. Maybe at the end I'll be like, hey, make sure you check out this thing. Like, find your voice challenge and buy it. But I don't want it to be all about the selling. I want it to be more about the connection. So I want the emails to be where the sales happen. Right. So I guess we could just talk about that whole topic and see what comes up. I don't really have a question yet.

Yeah, no, that's.

That.

That's great. There. There were a few things that I could touch on. So you know that I personally don't use a Facebook group, but I would love to speak to why that would actually help me out and how a Facebook group in conjunction with email, how it makes sense to use them together, how they can feed one another, but also how they're different. So we could speak to that. But yeah, let me mention this idea of growth plus monetization, because a lot of people get stuck here. And to be completely honest, I got stuck here. So I've had a personal email list for a couple of years. And early on, it was really. It was a hobby. It was a brain dump. It was something that helped me to clarify my own thoughts. And there were people who were just interested to listen to what I had to say. And so I wasn't really concerned about making it a business. It was just a creative outlet for me. But as more and more people joined, I saw that there was an opportunity to help some of them more deeply. And so I started putting together some limited offers Ways to work with people. Here's a $49 course. Here's a kind of like a coaching sprint session kind of thing. So some different things that I tested and tried, and what I learned is that working with a handful of people in a client relationship helped me even further to clarify what my content needed to be about and clarify the understanding what people's real pain points were, why they were attracted to what I was talking about in the first place, and helped me to further develop and clarify ways that I could help them. So having people express interest with a credit card is a strong signal for you. So we all know that social media followers or likes or subscriber count or number of people in a group. I mean, those are metrics of something, but they are not perfect. They don't tell us everything we need to know about who our people are and how we can best serve them. So creating something that requires payment helps you to help them. Just the information of whether or not people buy is very, very, very valuable. So that's one piece of this. The second piece is it's really fun to get sales. When I put something together and put it out there and see that people like it and want almost doesn't matter what that amount is, whether it's $9.99 or if it's $999, I feel like the dopamine hit, for me is about the same. It's just this indication that people see value in this. This is important. This is something that I need to do more of. So it gives life and energy into the content creation piece, and it also helps support it. So if there's revenue coming in, it's easier for me to allocate time and resources to do more of this thing. Right.

Yeah. What do you think would be the best strategy? So when we're bringing someone into a Facebook group and they're in the community, how long do you think it makes sense before you start to sell or do you work on some kind of nurturing campaign to get them to do it?

You know, it kind of depends on how people come in. If people are organically finding you and they're like, yes, this is something I want more of, and they come in, I think that you can make them an offer immediately, but it shouldn't be pushy. It should be an option kind of like, hey, we have this thing that it's really helpful. It basically helps you save time, or it helps you go faster, or it helps you. Basically, people are willing to spend money on something that saves Them time saves them money or makes them money. So if we could put something together that's genuinely helpful and just point to it and say this is here if you want it, but also you don't have to do this. Then about 5% of people who come in will say, well yeah, I actually do wanna move faster. And paying 29, 39, $49 to move faster, that's a no brainer. I'm interested in this right now. I wanna scratch the itch. So let's, yeah, I'll pay 50 bucks to go faster. And for that 5% of people, you're doing them a service. And the other 95%, it doesn't mean that they're not good leads. But if they're not in the, in the mood to buy right now, that's totally fine. I don't wanna alienate them. Yeah. So I want to divert them into free nurture content. But I think that you should present something pretty much immediately.

Yeah, I love that because I mean that reminds me of your email because once you're taking too long, then it's like the longer you take, the harder it is not just for them to buy, but for you to want to sell. I mean that's what I went through because I was, I started do the thing off of a hobby and was really just researching for a book and actually similar to what you did with your newsletter where I started more for just my own personal outlet. And then I realized how many resources I was putting into it and said, okay, I've got to do something with this. But then it was like the longer I took, the longer it took. It's kind of like jumping in the cold water sometimes you just gotta jump in and not just go down slowly.

Exactly. So again I mentioned that I, I think I took too long to do this and that realization that my inconsistent monetization was, was slowing this whole thing down and that it was preventing me from serving people at the level that I knew that I really could. And so I've made some changes to this whole thing just in the last six months. And so if people join my newsletter now, I, as of right now, I'm not doing what I just told you you should do. I'm creating the welcome automation that's going to do that right now because I had some. Right now there's something very lame. There's a single welcome email and it's not very good, admittedly not very good. But that was in my mind, that was not necessary. But it's a really, really nice to have that I'm now putting in place. But basically when people get on my list, they're going to have the option to immediately upgrade to a paid subscription, which basically means I'm gonna send you even more emails and you're gonna pay for the extra ones. Which for most people that sounds crazy. They're like, I hate getting emails anyways. Why would I pay for more? But for the people who are resonating with what I'm talking about and see the value that I can provide with them, then this is a no brainer. It's like 10 bucks a month or a hundred a year. And since I've put that premium option in place, even though I haven't really aggressively marketed it or anything, I'm getting like a new subscriber about every two days. So that's cool because that's a low ticket offer, but that stacks up over time and those people are raising their hand and saying, yes, I want more emails from you about emails. And when I put together higher ticket offers, typically 90% of the buyers come from the group of people who have already paid a little bit more to see more. So it is a very, very logical progression both for me and for them in their own customer journey. But I'm still sharing a whole bunch of really valuable free stuff for people who are like, I don't know you well enough to pay you anything, right? So they can hang out on my free newsletters for as long as they want, as long as they keep opening them. Otherwise they get kicked out. But then when the time is right for them, when they see something that makes them think, you know what, this is a no brainer, then that pathway is available to them. But I reveal the pathway immediately and say, you don't need to walk down this path right now. I don't care if you do right now, Just know it's there so that when you do want to go faster, get serious about this. This is the step you take. And in the meantime, I'm going to entertain you and give you free stuff.

Yeah, I love how you're open. Actually saw your email this morning talking about the welcome sequence. So it's cool to see you on this path we're all on. Right? It's like we want to do all these things and now it's important for you to do it because you're seeing the value of it and then you're sharing that. So we talked about kind of the process for coaching where okay, it's going to save time, go faster, pay me money, kind of thing. What about for someone in the E Commerce space? So it's funny, one of the guys that signed up for my audience accelerator program, he has a product that he's building right now, but it's not going to be ready till January, which happens a lot, right? You're sourcing this product, you got to make it, you got to do the manufacturer and it takes a while. But we're building out his group now and I don't want him to go through the same thing I did where I took a while. So in my mind I was like, oh, let's do a pre order landing page so we can already be seeing who's going to convert now while you're building this great community. And it's funny, I'm building. I don't know if I mentioned it, but I have this E Commerce brand that I've been messing around with. It's called Kitchen Pixie. And I have these baking dishes that are fine, they're nice, everyone likes them, but it's not. Doesn't excite me. So I haven't been promoting it, but I'm now working on air freshener for the kitchen. It's called Pixie Spray, which kind of just gives you this moment while you're cooking and you get to come into yourself. So that I'm actually more excited about. But it's funny, I didn't even consider doing a preorder page or the air freshener. I'm thinking of him, but I'm not thinking of me. But anyway, it seems like this is going to be a thing that's going to come up a lot as people join my program or if people aren't in the program and they just want the information. You guys have this free info to listen to now and you could do it yourself as well. But yeah, just wondering what your thoughts are with that from the email perspective in terms of the pre order and strategy for that.

I love, I love pre orders. I love pre orders. I would say as soon as the business owner has a high degree of belief that this product will exist, meaning you probably have the product identified, you probably have a manufacturer identified that's formulated, whatever, like you're ready to go, you just haven't placed the order or maybe you have placed the order and you're waiting for fulfillment, at that point I would go live. I would put together a pre order page and send that to your VIPs and give them some reason to purchase now versus waiting. So you say, look, this is a preorder. It's going to take two months for us to fulfill this. But if you're willing to join us now, then here's the incentive. And that can be as simple and stupid as a discount. 20% off retail if you pre order. Or it could be a bonus. Get an extra bonus item if you pre order. People pay extra for different kinds of things. If the founder has done a good job audience building and it has kind of a personal brand developed, you can give people access to you as a bonus. Hey, I'm going to do a VIP appreciation zoom call so you can get invited to this call and it'll be like a, you can ask me anything about the product, the company. It'll be a behind the scenes, we're going to have some free bonuses, door prizes, whatever. I mean, you can be as creative as you want, but give people some reason to pay upfront and wait two months and know that the people who are on board with you at that early stage are probably going to be your superfans if you give them a good customer experience all the way through. But that's also such a strong signal that you're on the right track when you have people willing to pay upfront for something that doesn't exist yet. That means that when it does exist, your sales are going to be exponentially greater when you can maintain stock and inventory levels. So personally I love pre orders, you can design it. So it is a great experience for the customers who participate. And it is such a shot in the arm for the business owner, for the business to have that early feedback and know that you're onto something before you have thousands of units of whatever either in a 3 PL warehouse that you're paying storage on or in your garage. It's just, it's such a relief to know that, that this is gonna work early on.

And you're also able to give those people that are on that list really just first step touch to what it's like to be part of that process. So I, I really love that. From an email perspective, how would you suggest promoting something like that? Because especially when you're, we're thinking of a group, it's community. So they're not just hearing about the product, they're hearing about whatever that higher level thing with the product is. So what would be kind of the way to approach it from the email without burning them out of the product, if that makes sense?

Absolutely. We just created some content about this very thing inside of capitalism, by the way. So anybody listening to this, who's in that Community, you'll be able to see what I'm talking about. So I can kind of go high level with how I would encourage people to think about this. All of your content should always be a give to your audience. Even sales asks. And this is hard for a lot of business owners to understand because we have some hesitation in selling or being too salesy. But if we do this in the right way, sales is service, right? If we truly have created something that helps and we truly believe in what we're doing, then the more people that we can get our solution to are more people that are helped, more people that are better off because they found us. So if we're gearing up for a pre launch, then the type of content that I think is valuable to share is some of this behind the scenes type stuff, right? This is the nitty gritty of creating a business. Here's where we are with manufacturing. Here's what's going on with the supplier and fulfillment dates and share a little bit of the struggle and the stress that goes on behind the scenes. But let that always be framed as this is what we are doing in service to you. This is what it takes to bring a product to market. And even though it's hard and kind of sucks, we believe in this and know that it's going to help you. And so we are enduring this struggle and for you, okay? And then when you're getting closer, I would again kind of remind people of the problem you're solving, talk up the benefits and the uniqueness of your solution, get them excited about what's about to come. So you're building demand, you're building desire. And then you say, we are going to pre sell, stick some sort of FOMO on this. That's real meaning if your first order is for 1,000 units and you have 3,000 people in your group, you can say, our pre order is only 1,000 units and there's 3,000 people in the group. And so we don't know if everybody's going to buy one. But this first batch might sell out and it might take us two months to get the second batch in. So if you want to be in the beta tester group, here's the benefits, here's the incentives for this pre order again. But also know that there's a limitation on this. I've seen so many people do a pre launch in a set time window and the framing is, hey, we're about to place our next order, but we need to know how many to order. So we're going to pre sell from this day until this day. And if you don't place an order in that pre sale window, then you may not get anything in the first batch because we're going to order how many we need and we're bootstrapping. So it's not like we can order 10,000 extras. Right? We're looking to pre sell 500 units within the week. And if you don't get on board, you might have to wait six months. And that's all very real. I mean, physical product brands are really expensive to run. Inventory capital is always a constraint. So we're not making anything up, we're simply sharing the truth. I can only afford to order a thousand units. I've got 5,000 people following me on Instagram, there's 2,000 on the email list. And so if you're serious about this and you want it, I mean, make a decision quickly. I'm not trying to scare you. Or if you don't need it right now, that's cool, you can wait six months for the second batch, I'm cool with that. But just be transparent about some of that behind the scenes challenges that encourages people to make a decision now. And not only are they deciding, yes, I want this product, but they're deciding yes, I want to support this business owner. I believe in what they're doing and so I am willing to pay them full price now and wait two months instead of prime two day shipping.

It just makes me so happy to hear it because I think so many times people might be coming from a needy energy and wanting to say, oh, help me out, I'm doing this pre order. But instead you're coming from a place of certainty because of how good your product is and how good the mission of what your product is going to do for them. And so you're kind of really re tapping in to why you're even creating it in the first place.

Absolutely. It's really easy to slip into that place of neediness and it's a bad place to sit because when you are communicating with people from a place of need, then it just, it seeps through into that messaging. And so you show up as, hey, I need to take from you. Even if that's not your logical intent, that is subconsciously what you're projecting and that it comes through in your messaging, in your copy, in your lives, in your comments. However you're communicating people, if, if there's this sense that I really need this to happen, you come off as needy and it's not a good vibe. And that is not what's going to draw people in. But if you come across as confident that yes, I'm doing this as a service to you and I know this helps, totally different energy and people have a totally different reaction to that.

Okay, so for anyone listening, cause I do have a lot of people that follow capitalism that are here because I've met so many people at capcon and different events that I've done. So they can find this specifically laid out in the 1% and then anyone that isn't, then go there.

Absolutely, yeah. As of the week of November 8, 2023, there is all kinds of new content in the 1% content portal that is really all about getting from 0 to 1, getting from idea to first sale and then getting from first sale to a consistent hundred sales a day. And for most businesses that represents a million dollar business.

This is great because the other thing that I like about that is you're not just throwing up a pre order page and saying, oh, order my product. You're literally doing it like you would a launch strategy. Oh yeah, by 100%.

Yeah, that's a good point. When we are generating traffic through whatever we're doing outside to bring people into our world. This is in conjunction with specifically what you're teaching. Using Facebook as the hub and bringing people into a group. Really the goal with all the traffic in my mind would be to get them into the place where you control their attention. So that can be a Facebook group and, or the email list. And then the traffic from the email list then goes to the sales page. Right. So what a lot of people do on social media is they'll be posting on Instagram saying, hey, we have this thing for sale. Go here to buy it. Super ineffective. Instead they should be posting on Instagram, hey, we're helping this type of person. If you'd like to learn more, sign up here. If you'd like to learn more, join this group. And then the conversation about what you have to offer that's for sale happens inside of that inner world, not on the outside. Traffic source.

Yeah, I like that. Because then you're doing it from an engaged place, not just from some random follower that. I've been talking about this a lot with the one dimensional versus a three dimensional person. I think the person that follows you on Instagram, you don't really even know who they are, but when they go into a place like an email list or a Facebook group, then you're actually able to get to know them a little bit better.

Exactly, exactly. There's a caveat here. You can run paid traffic, paid ads to cold traffic, and have that directly convert to a sale. Right. There's businesses that. That's their whole model, and that's fine, but those are typically not raving fan buyers. Right. You get them for one purchase, and then the repurchase rate on average is 10 to 20% at best. Okay, so that can work if you've got a really, really, really strong backend put in place. But I think what you're teaching people to do and what I'm teaching people to do is to have that customer experience core built first. And then if later, if you decide to run paid traffic into that world, not only is it going to convert better on the front, but then your reorder rate's going to be like 40, 50, 60, 70%, so that it actually makes sense to spend a dollar knowing that you're going to make six in the next 90 days versus spending a dollar and making a dollar back and then being like, oh, please, please let them buy again so that I don't go broke from Facebook ads this month.

Yeah, I mean, you have to kind of know what your system and what works before you start to run pay traffic to it.

Exactly, exactly. And if you're running paid traffic on a hope and a prayer, that's when you have to be very, very aggressive with the selling up front. Because if you don't get that sale right now, then this person whose attention you just grabbed might never be back. Right. That dollar that you paid to get them for 10 seconds, if you don't get them to pay you right now, you've lost your chance. So the type of sales that is necessary to make paid traffic work, that is the type of sales that I think a lot of people are kind of repulsed by. Right. So if we can do that relationship piece first and really have that dialed in, have that customer experience dialed in first and see that it's working. We have sales from inside our community, from inside our email list that is being built organically. When we know that's working, then we can decide to turn on that paid traffic source confidently and not need to go to that hard sell style. Because we know that our system works. We just need to get people in, and it's such a less stressful way to scale a business. If you can get that customer relationship, customer experience piece dialed in and then simply add fuel to fire.

I wanted to just speak to the listeners for a minute and see if you want to add to this, because one of the reasons why we're having this conversation. And I'm even doing the audience accelerator is part of a Do the Thing missions is because what I've noticed through the things that I've been doing, whether it's the Go Live challenge or helping people start podcasts or helping people start books or find their voice, is there's so many people that are just stuck and they're wanting more and they don't know, like, how to get there and how to start moving. And so I've just really felt like this is now my life's mission is to get people's voice out of their body and be able to have people hear it. But then also, one of my community members at one point had said to me she wanted to own her time, and I loved how she worded that. It wasn't just, oh, I want to open a business. It wasn't, I want to invest. It was, I want to own my time. Right. And I equate that to you want to do what you love and make money for it or have already made the money and then do whatever you want. Either way is good. But I think you are on the same kind of path as me, and I just would love to hear kind of what you have to say about that.

Yeah, my thinking on this has changed over time. But I'll tell you what you are teaching people to do. To simply begin taking action and iterating the quality of what you're doing as you're doing it. That is fundamentally how people have to start. And that first step is very, very. That can be very challenging, very difficult. And I think back to my first steps in anything I've done, and it was challenging and difficult. But the first step leads to the second, and that leads to the third. And by the time you're on the thousandth step, it looks like you know what you're doing. And in step one, two, and three, it doesn't. But that's okay. That's where everybody starts. And to kind of hone this ability to exercise this muscle, I seek out difficult or uncomfortable things to do, and I intentionally do them because it just helps develop that ability to simply say, this is going to be messy, but I'm going to start anyways. I'm going to learn on the go. And I just have to be okay with not caring about what people think at the beginning, but then also realizing nobody really cares. Everybody's more worried about themselves than what anybody else is doing. And the people who are willing to take that first step into discomfort Ultimately, they end up being the ones who are accomplishing great things. If you never take the step, you have zero possibility of getting to where you dream of being.

Yeah, it's so true. And I don't think people realize that when they're taking that step one and that step two and step three and they don't know what they're doing yet, how much they're inspiring someone else that they might not even know just by them seeing them do it. And I don't think if people knew how powerful that was in the moment, I think it would help them even do it more. I noticed that with my podcast. My very first episode was so painful to publish because it was three minutes, the sound was horrible. And then I did some intro where the sound was even worse saying why the sound was bad. And I kept it because I was like, whatever, at least it's there. And thank God, because not only did that get my podcast to now have, I think I have 210 episodes on it, but that one episode is the one I showed everyone in the Start a podcast challenge. And what helped everyone hit publish because they got to listen to my first episode. And I don't think enough people realize that you are literally inspiring someone just by you taking that messy action.

Yeah, absolutely. And when I first started, I had an email list of zero. And since then I have written and sent hundreds and hundreds of emails, both for myself, for clients that I've worked with. And those emails have generated tens of thousands. I don't know, maybe hundreds. I haven't really done the math because it's just like that's not a number that I think about. But now people look at what I'm doing and they're like, this guy knows something about email, right? Am I the email expert? Am I the best at email marketing in the world? Absolutely not. There are people who are better at copywriting than me. There are people who are better at storytelling. There are people who are better at growth. There are people who are better at monetization. There's somebody who's better than me in anything that I think I'm kind of good at. But nobody writes anybody emails like I do. And the people who read my emails are there to read my emails. This is a key, key, key point. So anybody who hesitates to get started because you think you have to achieve perfection before you get going, you're screwed. You have to get rid of that belief. You will not achieve perfection before you get started, and you probably won't achieve perfection after you get started. What makes you valuable is your uniqueness. And as you get going, and when you realize that you don't need to chase becoming the expert or the best, and instead discover what you uniquely have to offer and simply be the best version of your unique self, that's when you win. That's when you pass up everyone else. That's when you become an expert. The only thing you can actually be an expert at is being yourself. And I'm still learning this, right? What's expert, Greg? I'm figuring that out. But when you realize that that's the journey that you're on, not only does it become more fun, but you have something to actually track growth and progress against, that makes sense. Instead of looking to the left or right, concerned about what everybody else is doing, you can evaluate how you are improving in how you help people and when that is the metric that you're measuring. This is really, really fun and really lucrative.

It's so huge because at each step, at each growth phase, at each thing, you're going to run into this again. And to be able to kind of follow that and know that it's your unique message, I think is really important. I went through this even just recently with this audience accelerator thing. I'm like, oh, my God, there's so many people that are doing this. What are you crazy? And I've had to literally look at my stuff and go, no, you are doing it different. It is so much different. And so it's just every time you grow in a different way, you could talk yourself out of doing something, but people are really going to resonate with you because of you.

Absolutely.

So, okay, this has been amazing. I would love to hear your number one piece of advice for people on accelerating their audience.

Number one piece of advice for people accelerating their audience. There's a couple things, but I think it all boils down to consistency. Be willing to show up every day, whether you're in the mood or not, whether you think you're good or not, but show up every day consistently and get a little bit better. If you are 1% better than yesterday, every single day, then you're going to be pretty freaking dangerous in six months, 12 months, a year, right? Two years. And that just compounds. You usually don't go backwards at all. Once you're getting better, you usually don't suddenly get worse, but you need to start stacking towards your unique value. And if you don't know what that is today, it just means you need to get started. So daily consistent action. Get 1% better and if you do that it is inevitable that you will succeed. It's just a matter of time right? The time may be different for different people depending on what they're doing but if you are consistently getting 1% better every day then the way the math works out is that you are guaranteed success at some point in the future.

Thank you so much for doing this with me Greg. This was really good.

Ah my pleasure Stacey anytime.

And please share where people can sign up your newsletter and anything else you'd like to share here.

Best place to find me is emailmagic.com and perhaps by the time this is published I have a very very polished seven part welcome series but if people get on earlier than that they're going to see a very very sad looking single email and understand this is simply where I started so that I could.

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